KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
our Two-year Reprieve On August 23,1939, Russia and Nazi Germany signed the Molo- tov- Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, with a clause providing for the partition of Poland, home to 3.5 million Jews, between Ger- many and Russia in the event of war. Then, on September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland from the west; Russia attacked from the east a few weeks later, on September 17. By September 18, the Polish government had fled to Romania (it later moved to London) and eastern Poland, including Ludvipol, fell under the control of Russia. Just before and after these invasions, thousands of refugees, many of them Jewish, flowed into Volhynia from western Poland. The influx slowed by November and stopped by the end of the year. Ludvipol at that time had a Jewish population of 2,000 and a Gentile population of 150. 1 The town did its best to “adopt” the ref- ugees and find suitable work for them. Naftali Feder (who later was a member of the Israeli Knesset) was hired as a biology teacher at the Tarbut School. Another refugee found work at a photography studio, presumably Gittel Golub’s. The refugees confirmed rumors that in the west, the Germans were instituting anti-Semitic policies and forcing Jews into ghettos. Meanwhile, as one of the first towns occupied by Russia, Ludvi - pol was in the throes of mass confusion. Many of its families found themselves split apart with some members on one side of the bor- der and some on the other. Pesach Kleinman’s aunt, for instance, never saw her parents again. In Ludvipol and elsewhere, Jewish and Polish reactions to the occupation differed significantly. Notes Eva Hoffman, “To the Poles [in the village of Bransk], the Russians were a traditional enemy, hated nearly as much as the Germans. To the Jews, the Red Army was seen, first and foremost, as an army of liberation from the much worse German menace. In addition, a segment of the Jewish population felt an ideological affinity with the Soviets [and] a sizable portion of the Jewish community welcomed the Soviet Our Two-Year Reprieve
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